I crossed the Gulfstream on my sailboat. Twice.
Failure is part of the growing process. The probabilities of your first company being sucessfull is very slim. But a failure helps you with the next company you create.
Source: started 15 different companies and 2 worked out. But they really worked out.
One of the biggest problems with Government procurement is that the bandwidth is limited. By this I mean that PSPC only has a few dozen procurement officers that track all contracts and bids, etc… it is impossible for them to track hundreds of thousands of small relationships (bidding, billing, and otherwise), so instead they have minimum income requirements for contract bidders. That means the only large companies can win real contracts. In that way, the system is rigged.
But, large companies won’t bid on small projects; it’s not worth their time and the profit margins are typically not big enough. So, the projects have to be massive OR BE MADE TO APPEAR MASSIVE in order to attract bids from large firms.
The limited bandwidth also explains why so many projects get enormous as there is not enough bandwidth to actually check the deliverables and the received value of these deliverables. Add the fact that most IT projects go absolutely NUTS with creeping featurism (which is asking for things that was never described in the contract) and those get billed at a massive premium. The longer the project timeline, the higher the risk of this creep, even for tiny projects.
So, this ArriveCan is a very simple IT offering; that means a small project, with a tight timeline, for an agency that is famous for changing its IT requirements mid-project. They can’t take a chance that their be no bidders to the RFP, so they have to make it more complex on paper, and it has to be in the millions of dollars to attract big companies. So a big company probably won the contract and immediately sub-contracted it to a very small firm (that’s quite usual) for pennies on the dollar. The small company then is responsible for communicating with the CBSA and trying to figure out the real needs and requirements. That’s when the IT fun begins and most of it was probably out of the description of the contract and the app probably got redone completely 2 or 3 times. The first iterations were probably so complex and user threatening that additional expertise had to be brought in the simplify it. All of it out of contract.
Meanwhile, the big company assigns one or two project managers, relationship managers, etc… that get billed at full days each even if they don’t have much to do. They take a huge cut in top of any experts that have to be brought from outside the contract, sometimes double the rate of the expert.
And instead of a simple app that could have been coded and tested by one person in 4 months, you gets this monster project because it was so politically important and « we can’t afford it to fail ».
Big fight in a local downtown McDonald’s. Someone films a few seconds of it and a split second of the end of the video shows a guy pulling a raccoon out of his trench-coat. Makes the news worldwide.
It will be as long as you only go spinwards or counter-spinwards. Changing your direction rapidly in the direction of aft or forward will knock you to the ground. Going counter-spinwards will decrease your “weight” and vice-versa. So at certain speeds with a BMX it could be quite dangerous. I don’t see humans using anything else than tube trains to move around.
I just hope it’s not going to get stuck at 87% like the other updates.
Anyone got a Tildes invite they could spare ? It looks very interesting.
Configuring my UUCP connection to provide my BBS users with « electronic mail ».
I was a partner at Resudox. I was also one of the original UUCP nodes in the city. I helped Mac Brown start his ISP. I was a client of Fonorola when it became iStar.
While I was at Resudox, we sent out a large amount of emails to Freenet users advertising our services, a spam run that I still apologize for to this day.
Before all of this, I was the owner of The QuBE BBS, supporting UUCP and Fidonet via Welmat (hi Russel!)
The QuBE started with one HST modem and one dedicated phone line.
Ottawa had quite the BBS scene at the time.
I am immune to a lot of anaesthetics and painkillers. This was figured out after surgery.
ByWard had random people shooting fireworks from Rideau Street until 3AM last night, and then started again at 5AM for some reason.